Good Riddance, Facebook ‘Fact-Checkers’

Previous content moderation policies at social media giants buried, not defended, the truth

By Drew Holden, managing editor at American Compass

Few topics set social media abuzz more than changes to the rules that govern how people can actually use those social media platforms. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s (née Facebook) CEO, announced that the platform would change its content-moderation approach—the way the site deals with posts that are, according to at least someone, not true—abandoning an “expert”-driven process.

Zuckerberg announced that this system (as well as ending their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts) was being replaced by one that relied on the community to police content, similar to X (née Twitter). Offending posts would be tagged with a digital scarlet letter and an explanation of why it was disputed. 

Previously, Facebook and Twitter (before Elon Musk’s purchase) relied on a heavier-handed system of fact-checking user posts, relying on “expert,” “independent” “fact-checkers” to determine the veracity of various claims. These groups were mostly newspapers, predominantly legacy, mainstream publications but including some conservative ones, as well as institutions whose sole focus is fact-checking. These groups are notorious for their left-wing bias, particularly around elections, frequently labeling posts supporting conservative efforts as inaccurate while ignoring dubious claims in the opposite political direction.

As should surprise no one, the “experts” who no longer get to decide what constitutes reality are in an uproar—particularly within the pages of the outlets who were once the vaunted fact-police. The New York Times published a piece highlighting their objections, (seriously) titled “Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.” It alleged that the issue wasn’t the behavior of the noble fact-checkers but from Facebook. The facts they relied on couldn’t themselves be biased, they protested, just what might be done with them. Now the American people would be left defenseless against conspiracy theories and other lies. The sentiment was common beyond the Times, too. The Washington Post, NPR, ABC News, TIME, and others were quickly out with articles raising the specter of increased disinformation.

But the Times and their fellows invert the real problem with content moderation. 

A more hands-on approach to policing users is limited in its ability to actually identify and correct false information on the internet. That’s in part because facts evolve more rapidly than the moderators can possibly keep track of, even with AI and other measures. And part of the limitation is simply human, as David French wrote in 2019 for National Review:

There are reasons, for example, why there is no “hate speech” category in American constitutional law. There is no workable definition that does not sweep too broadly. There are reasons why viewpoint neutrality is the hallmark of First Amendment jurisprudence. Censors can behave in unpredictable, arbitrary, and capricious ways — and no one has a sufficient monopoly on truth to serve as philosopher king over speech and debate.

Regardless, one might wonder why anyone cares about Facebook’s content moderation at all. Despite three billion active users worldwide, Facebook isn’t exactly the place where “the discourse” happens. Who cares about the domestic moderation of Boomers posting about their neighborhoods and Minions memes?

But the real problem in social media content moderation at Facebook (and once upon a time, at Twitter) is that it’s overactive use can bury real stories inconvenient to the narratives preferred by the media and academic elite. The “expert-driven,” partisan application of that power from these social media giants in recent years has had real, deleterious impacts not just on the first rough draft of history, but to our political process, and maybe even our ability to confront the next pandemic.

One striking example is how content moderation, on the eve of the 2020 Election, buried the Hunter Biden laptop story; explosive allegations tying future-President Joe Biden to influence peddling and other illicit dealings by his son. When the New York Post broke the damning details of that laptop, it quickly caught fire—until it was billed as “misinformation.” News outlets rushed to say the story wasn’t true, and then Facebook and Twitter blacklisted the story, preventing users from posting or even privately messaging the piece, citing “fact-checkers” and other experts. 

But those fact-checkers were just those same media entities—for Twitter, publicly linked; for Facebook, behind the austere-sounding “International Fact-Checking Network,” which is just a bunch of outlets particularly active in their fact-checking. The companies’ decision allowed these same outlets to then report about how the story was obviously incorrect, because social media leadership said so—relying on entirely circular logic, unbeknownst to the American public. It allowed the press not only to control the media narrative but also limit what every user on two massive social media platforms could so much as see.

The checkers were wrong. Hunter’s laptop was so real that, at the end of Biden’s term, the government introduced it as evidence against the president’s son in another case. But when it could have sunk Biden’s candidacy, it was buried in truly Orwellian fashion. The source of the errant claim was none other than the political campaign of then-candidate Joe Biden.  

But even more consequential perhaps than that coordinated attack on our democracy was the fact-checkers’ assault on the lab-leak theory of origin around COVID. The theory posited that there was at least a chance that, rather than occurring naturally in animals and then jumping to humans (as was so often claimed by the media and others), the pandemic originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, and was then released (either intentionally or accidentally).

This view has come to represent the consensus opinion of many agencies in the Biden administration, including the Department of Energy. The possibility seems facially reasonable: a few miles from where cases first presented, there is a Level 4 biolab that specializes in studying coronaviruses in bats, run by a secretive, authoritarian regime hostile not just to the United States but also the truth.

But fact-checkers at Facebook and Twitter took the same approach as the Hunter-Biden-laptop story. Users were banned for so much as suggesting that this “conspiracy theory” of COVID’s origin was true. The discussion of the alternative was shouted down online, helping bury it in the broader investigative and scientific communities. That initial burial has made investigating the origins of a global pandemic nearly impossible.

And it isn’t as if the fact-checkers haven’t missed in the other direction, too. For all that censoring, plenty of bogus media stories were allowed to proliferate—so long as they weren’t redounding to the benefit of Trump and Republicans. When Rolling Stone reported in 2021 that ivermectin—a medication Trump had recommended for treating COVID—was leading to so many hospitalizations in rural Arkansas that gunshot victims were being turned away, Facebook and Twitter let the story flourish, sending the news trending across social media. The only problem was that it was nonsense: a “story” cobbled together with scant evidence, relying on one freelancer’s perspective on a single hospital, that was quickly denied by all involved. Where were the fact-checkers then? 

There are countless more examples of these types of decisions, as Reason’s Robby Soave detailed in “The Facebook Files,” including Facebook taking censorship direction from Biden White House staff.

While “free speech” claims about what someone can post on a social media page are seriously overwrought, there’s an important spirit undergirding why a more hands-off approach makes sense. If Facebook and other apps are meant to be the digital town-square, then they shouldn’t be policed by politically motivated forces not looking to find truth so much as defend a narrative. It doesn’t mean tolerating everything, but it should prioritize openness.

But a word of caution: while these developments are positive, conservatives risk overreacting to this change when it comes to our collective views of Facebook and other social media companies. We can’t forget that these apps are culturally and socially poisonous, particularly for young people.

The hype around these decisions for Zuckerberg and Facebook should remember that fact. We so often make heroes on the right out of popular people who give us a crumb of public support. It seems foolish to not consider that Zuckerberg may be betting on exactly that, as he faces increased scrutiny from Congress and beyond on ads targeting teens on Instagram. 

A self-serving olive branch doesn’t mean Meta is operating in America’s best interest. Recent history indicates quite the reverse.